Ataturk shaped the destiny of a nation which was alone and dying. He gave it a new future. Under his progressive nationalist leadership his country broke free from its passive, inward-looking and parochial conservatism, ingrained through long centuries of habit, and from the defeatism and apathy engendered by the inexorable decline of its imperial power. Aiming to replace the image of Turkey as ' the Sick Man of Europe ' with that of a dynamic and self-renewing non-imperialist country capable of winning the respect of its more advanced European neighbours, he led his country out of the Middle Ages into the twentieth century in a mere couple of decades.

He achieved this through a co-ordinated series of sweeping reforms, all directed towards the creation in Turkey of a western-style democracy. These changes were so drastic that it is impossible to conceive that anyone could have brought them about if he had not been, like Mustafa Kemal, a national hero twice over as a result of his leadership at Gallipoli and his single-handed master minding of the Turkish War of Independence, which ended with the departure of all foreign armies from Turkish soil.

The philosophy behind Ataturk's reforms is now known as Kemalism. In February 1937 he had the following six principles written into Article Two of the Constitution of the Turkish Republic:

1. Republicanism
2. Nationalism
3. Populism
4. Revolutionism
5. Secularism
6. Etatism

The first four principles provide the basis for the new political life of the country, and the last two lay down the guidelines for his reforms.